1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to printing content of a page, and, in particular, to a system and method for selectively printing color content of a page with a reduced color gamut.
2. Description of Related Art
Modern color printing systems mark a printing substrate with patterns of lines or small dots of oval or round shape onto the printing substrate (e.g., a page can be printed on a piece of paper). The color printing system can mark the printing substrate with multiple inks or toners with differing colors generally referred to as colorants. Although most color printing systems have only four available colorants of toner (or ink), a much wider variety of colors are available for perception because of physiological and psychophysical aspects of human vision.
The set of colors of toner (or ink) that are chosen to create the wider variety of perceived colors is generally referred to as the color gamut. The most typically used color gamut is the “CMYK” color gamut. The “C” refers to Cyan toner, the “M” refers to “Magenta” toner, the “Y” refers to the “Yellow” toner, and the “K” refers to the “Black” toner. Although there are only three types of color receptors in the human eye (and one additional type of receptor for night vision), four toner colors are generally used because black toners are cheaper, and it is more efficient to use a black toner than to combine the cyan, magenta, and yellow toners to make a black color, e.g., a black toner dries faster than when combing the three aforementioned toners to make a black marking on the substrate. The cost of the toner (or ink) should be taken into consideration when printing color and/or monochrome pages.
However, the cost of the toner is usually only about 20% to 30% of the averaged marginal cost of printing a single page (e.g., a page can be printed on the substrate), and it is more expensive to print color pages rather than monochrome pages. Additionally, it is more expensive to print color pages than to print pages using a reduced color gamut, e.g., using only cyan, magenta, and black colorants. The dominant cost of the total marginal cost of printing a page is that particular page's proportionate service cost. Additionally, the service cost varies depending upon the content of the page. The service cost includes technician costs, repair costs, IT infrastructure costs, field offices costs, managers' and engineers' salaries, parts costs, labor costs, and the like.
The business model employed by many entities involved in color printing includes charging one fee for printing a monochrome page and another fee for printing a color page. The color pages are charged at a higher rate when compared to printing monochrome pages partly because of the increased service cost. This fee is sometimes referred to as a “per click” fee. This “per click” fee is an additional fee that is applied to each particular piece of printed page that attempts to account for the service cost. The per click service fee includes an estimated toner cost, a risk premium cost, and (depending on the arrangement) a profit margin. The risk premium cost is an estimated service cost that a particular piece of printing substrate will probabilistically cause a party to incur a service expense. Printing a color page has a significantly higher probability of incurring additional service costs as compared to printing a monochrome page.
However, the traditional “per click” fee is simply one of two predetermined fixed fees. When a user prints a purely monochrome page the per click fee is considered to be one rate and a different rate when printing a color page. This is sometimes referred to as the “one size fits all billing approach” and is simply billing one fee for printed monochrome pages and another fee for printed color pages, regardless of the content in the printed page. For example, the “per click” fee may be $0.01 (U.S) per monochrome printed page and $0.08 (U.S.) per color printed page.
The “one size fits all billing approach” doesn't generally take into account the objects that are in the page but only if the page is printed wholly in color or wholly in monochrome. For example, there are several types of objects that may be included in a page. Some of the types of objects that may be part of a page are: monochrome contone objects, color contone objects, monochrome text objects, color text objects, monochrome line art objects, color line art objects, monochrome graphic objects, color graphic objects, monochrome low frequency halftone objects, color low frequency halftone objects, monochrome high frequency halftone objects, color high frequency halftone objects, monochrome solid fill objects, and color solid fill objects. The service costs associated with the several objects vary. Additionally, any color objects may be printed (or contained within a page) using only two, or three colorants forming two-colorant objects, and three-colorant objects, respectively.